II 
RAIDS OF THE AMAZON ANTS 
OR more than forty years zoology has been 
continuously enriched by the observations of 
Professor Carlo Emery, an Italian naturalist, who 
has grown old in the service of entomology and in 
the study of ants in particular. One of his recent 
papers (1916) reports on fresh investigations of 
the European Amazon ant, one of the handsomest 
and most bewildering of pismires. To appreciate 
Emery’s advance we must recall the main facts 
of a strange story. Transitory mixed colonies of 
two species of ants are not very uncommon; they 
lead on to cases like the blood-red ant, Formica 
sanguinea, a gifted, belligerent creature which 
usually makes slaves of the workers of other species, 
but can thrive well enough without them if it 
chooses. Very different from these sanguinary 
ants, as they may be called, are the degenerate 
slave-holders and the social parasites, which are 
altogether dependent on their slaves or hosts, But 
between the degenerate forms which have sur- 
rendered independence for ease, and the sanguinaries 
which can be independent if they will, are the 
Amazons. They cannot live without slaves, and 
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